The Queen - Matt Ridley

Puberty strikes a young man like a hormonal thunderbolt: His testicles descend, his voice breaks, his body becomes hairier and leaner, and he begins to grow like a weed. The cause of all this is a veritable flood of testosterone from his testicles. He now has twenty times as much of it in his blood as a girl of the same age: The effect is to develop the mental photograph laid down in his head by the womb 's dose and to make his mind into that of an adult man.'

SEXISM AND THE KIBBUTZ LIFE

Asked about their ambitions, men from six different cultures replied with much the same answer. They wanted to be practical, shrewd, SEXING THE MIND

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assertive, dominating, competitive, critical, and self-controlled. They sought power and independence above all. Women from the same cultures wanted to be loving, affectionate, impulsive, sympathetic, and generous. They sought to serve society above all." Studies of male conversation find it to be public (that is, men clam up at home), domineering, competitive, status-obsessed, attention-seeking, factual, and designed to reveal knowledge and skill: Female conversation tends to be private (that is, women clam up in big groups), cooperative, rapport-establishing, reassuring, empathetic, egalitarian, and meandering (that is, to include talk for talk 's sake)."

There are, of course, exceptions and overlaps. Just as there are women who are taller than men, so there are women who want to be assertive and men who want to be sympathetic.

But just as it is still valid to make the generalization that men are taller than women, so it is valid to conclude that the adjec-tives listed above are fairly typical of the natures of men and women. Some must be related to the differences between hunting and gathering, the most uniquely human of the sex differences.

For example, it cannot be a coincidence that men enjoy hunting, fishing, and eating meat much more than women do. Some may be more recent, reflecting social norms that the sexes have i mposed on themselves through peer pressure and education (which was not always as sex blind as it strives to be today). For example, the male desire to be self-controlled may be a modern attribute, a recognition that he has a nature that needs controlling. Others may be more ancient, reflecting basic patterns that all apes share and that baboons do not, such as the fact that a woman generally leaves her group on marriage and lives with her offspring among what were hitherto strangers, whereas a man lives among kin. Others may be more ancient still and shared with all mammals and many birds, such as the fact that women nurture babies while men compete with other men for access to women. It surely cannot be a coincidence that men are obsessed with status in hierarchies and that male chimpanzees compete for status in strict hierarchies of dominance: The Israeli kibbutz system has proved to be a large natural

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The Red Queen

experiment in the persistence of sex roles. Men and women were initially encouraged to drop all sex roles in kibbutzim: Haircuts and clothes were unisex; boys were encouraged to be peaceful and sensitive, while girls were treated like tomboys; men did household chores and women went out to work: Yet three generations later, the attempt has largely been abandoned, and kibbutz life is actually more sexist than life in the rest of Israel. People have returned to stereotypes. Men politick, while women tend the home; boys study physics and become engineers, while girls study sociology and become teachers and nurses: Women manage the morale, health, and education of the kibbutz, while men manage the finances, security, and business: To some this is easily explicable: People have simply rebelled against the eccentric pattern set by their parents: Yet that explanation is more condescending than one that treats them as agents of their own choice, choosing according to their natures: Women clean house in a kibbutz because, like women everywhere, they complain that men would not do it properly. Men do not clean house in a kibbutz because, like men everywhere, they complain that if they did, their wives would say it had not been done properly. 2'

Nor are the kibbutzim unique: Even in liberated Scandinavia, it is women who feed the family, wash the clothes, and care for the children. Even where women go to work, some professions remain male bastions (for instance, garage mechanics, air-traffic controllers, driving test examiners, architects), while others have become female bastions (for instance, bank tellers, elementary school teachers, secretaries, interpreters): It is getting gradually more implausible to maintain that in the most egalitarian Western societies women are prevented by social prejudice from becoming garage mechanics. Women rarely want to become garage mechanics: They do not want to become garage mechanics because the world of the garage mechanic is an uninviting "man ' s world " in which they would feel unwelcome. But why is it a man 's world? Because it is a job that men have molded to suit their personalities, and male personalities are different from female ones.

SEXING THE MIND

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FEMINISM AND DETERMINISM

The bizarre thing about this assertion of different natures is that it is a thoroughly feminist assertion: There is a contradiction at the heart of feminism, one that few feminists have acknowledged. You cannot say, first, that men and women are equally capable of all jobs and, second, that if jobs were done by women, they would be done differently: So feminism itself is anything but egalitarian: Feminists argue explicitly that if more women were in charge, more caring values would prevail: They begin from the presumption that women are by nature different beings: If women ran the world, there would be no war: When women run companies, cooperation, not competition, is the watchword: These are all explicit and firm assertions of sexism: that the personalities and natures of women are different from men. If women ' s personalities are different, is it not likely that they will prove better or worse at certain jobs than men? Differences cannot be appealed to when they suit and denied when they do not:

Nor does it help to appeal to social pressure as the source of personality differences: If social pressure is as powerful as social scientists would have us believe, then a person 's nature is irrelevant; only his or her background counts: A man from a broken home who has led a life of crime is the product of that experience, and there is no spark of decent "nature" in his soul to redeem: Of course we scoff at such nonsense: We recognize him to be a product of both his background and his nature: It is the same with sex differences: To say that Western women do not enter politics in the same numbers as men because they have been conditioned to think of it as a man 's career is to patronize women: Politics is all about status-seeking ambition, which many women have a healthy cynicism about: Women have their own minds: They are capable of deciding to enter politics if they want to, whatever society says (and Western society, if anything, now affirms that they should). One of the things that make a political career uninviting may well be the sexism of those around them, but it is absurd to assume it is the only thing.

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The Red Queen

I have argued that men and women are different and that some of these differences stem from an evolutionary past in which men hunted and women gathered. So I am dangerously close to arguing that a woman 's place is in the home while her husband works as the breadwinner: Yet that conclusion does not at all follow from the logic presented here. The practice of going out to work in an office or a factory is foreign and novel to the psychology of a savanna-dwelling ape: It is just as foreign to a man as to a woman.